While employees were assured that “contraceptive coverage continues to be available and is consistent with the Women’s Health Prevention Act,” the announcement also clarified that male sterilization would no longer be covered. Employees were encouraged to contact the state Department of Health for “additional resources available for sexual and reproductive health.”
The changes will take effect in 2025, giving employees just a few weeks to obtain reproductive health services like abortion and vasectomies under their current coverage.
In Washington, this is an unusual decision. Most health plans that cover maternity care “must also provide substantially equivalent abortion coverage,” according to Brionna Aho, a spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office. Religiously affiliated insurance companies are allowed to opt out of this coverage, but in these cases the Department of Health pays for the abortion through a program known as Increasing access to reproductive choice.
But Virginia Mason Franciscan Health has some discretion over coverage because it is self-funded, meaning the employer pays employee claims. In self-funded plans, minimum health insurance standards under federal law prevent the state from requiring coverage for certain services, said Jane Beyer of the Office of the Insurance Commissioner.
This means that despite Washington’s strong protections for abortion coverage under state law, Virginia Mason Franciscan Health’s termination of abortion and other reproductive health coverage for employees is technically legal.
Staffers like Rosewarne see the shift as evidence of a broader disinvestment from the institution of reproductive health care, including pregnancy care, labor and delivery. The Family Birth Center was Virginia Mason Franciscan Health’s only birth center in the city. Now, employees planning to give birth at a Virginia Mason facility will have to travel to the remaining units in Burien, Tacoma or Federal Way. The closest of these is almost 12 miles away.
When secular and religious medical institutions merge, cuts to services like elective abortion and medical assistance in dying are commonplace; both are prohibited by religious guidelines followed by Catholic hospitals. Even in states where abortion is legal, it is common for faith-based hospitals to deny abortion care or, in a practice that mimics restrictions in states where abortion is banned, to turn away patients unless they are seriously ill or transfer them to secular hospitals. .
But access to services less subject to legal difficulties, such as maternity care, has also been affected.
Hilt, the current president of Virginia Mason Franciscan Health, joined the organization from Ascension Healthcare, another private Catholic hospital system. She was CEO of Ascension when the company closed the only labor and delivery unit on Milwaukee’s south side. The unit closed on Christmas Eve 2022.
She said the decision to close the Seattle Birth Center was based on “consistently low utilization of the Seattle Family Birth Center, suggesting that community needs are being met by other maternity services available in proximity, while the need for intensive care continues to grow. year.”
But the closure echoes a narrowing of options available to people giving birth nationwide since the law was overturned. Roe v. Wade led to the closure of labor and delivery units in anti-abortion states like Idaho. This is also happening in states like Washington, regardless of this politicization. In August, Kaiser Permanente announced that it close your midwifery practice in 2025. The clinic has been operating since 1990. Kaiser patients in Seattle who want to see midwives for their pregnancy care will soon have to travel as far as Bellevue or Tacoma.
The Washington State Nurses Association, which represents 650 registered nurses employed at Virginia Mason, opposed the birth center’s closure, which left 55 registered nurses without jobs. On November 14, the union held a vigil outside the entrance to Virginia Mason Medical Center, at Seneca Street and Terry Avenue, to express its disapproval of the way the unit’s closure was handled.
For the nurses who worked at the Family Birth Center, what happens next is unclear. Of those 55, some will go to St. Anne’s in Burien, others to Overlake Medical Center. Some will change their specialty.
After 20 years, Rosewarne gave up bedside nursing altogether.
It was a choice she didn’t want to make.
“People who do this job, whether they’re nurses or providers, do it because it’s a calling, they care, and people want to do a really good job,” he said. -she declared.
At the Family Birth Center, it looked like a lot of everyday things: caring for home birth patients who needed interventions, working with a doctor who had developed a postpartum wellness and recovery program for patients with hypertension, assisting with inductions for patients transferred from other hospitals and working with community midwives.
The unit had a rocky start: It opened during the pandemic and didn’t see as many births as a high-capacity provider like Swedish. But its reputation had grown, and by November it had been around long enough for regular customers to consider returning for future deliveries. On its last day of activity, children born at the Family Birth Center came to work with their parents.
“What we did was take care of individuals and families,” Rosewarne said. “And that can’t be replicated.” And so these consolidations have a huge impact on care.